On September 27th 2018 the research proposal Living, Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems (livMatS) was selected for funding as a Cluster of Excellence in the German Excellence Strategy.

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rühe, Prof. Dr. Anna Fischer, Prof. Dr. Thomas Speck (Team of Spokespersons livMatS): "We are very pleased that livMatS has been selected for funding as a Cluster of Excellence and that we can now realize our vision of entirely novel materials systems that adapt to their environment in an autonomous fashion and harvest clean energy from their surroundings. We are looking forward to pushing the research in our highly interdisciplinary team of researchers from the natural and the behavioral sciences, engineering and the humanities and further develop Freiburg's strong position in materials research."